We just received this in the email. It’s to publicize a project funded by AHRQ so is both legit and valuable, & worth knowing about if like us you believe that postmodern medicine is fundamentally digital and data-driven. === Broad, Brianna <brianna.broad@academyhealth.org> To whom it may concern: My name is Brianna Broad and I am […]

Just a day in the life of healthcare research — and this is just the tip of an iceberg of discoveries that were of varying degrees of significance but for whatever reason were not selected by the good folks at phys.org: – Misplaced molecules: New insights into the causes of dementia – Proteins with mutations […]

The report from the 2013 World Economic Forum (available here) is astounding. Not for what it says — most of which is said well — but for what it fails to say even in the light of its own survey data. Those data show that “Chronic labour market imbalances,” defined as “A sustained high level […]

I now get most (not all) of my information on advances in medicine and health courtesy of that excellent service, phys.org. They send me a daily email containing links to stories I might find relevant to the Digest. When one of the stories seems significant, I usually tweet my summary of the article and of […]

Quantum Computing and Moore’s Law Expert opinion says Moore’s Law will end. We think quantum computing will come sooner than they think. A reason why we remain bullish about it is that there’s a breakthrough just about every day. A recent one was the creation of a way to store and retrieve video made up […]

Automation and the End of Work At years end 2011, MIT’s Technology Review pointed to “5 Disruptive Technologies Happening Now.” They were: E-books, 3D printers, digital CCTV, DNA sequencing machines, and artificial intelligence (AI). The first two are apotheoses of automation: They take humans largely out of the loop. The fifth—AI—will take us out completely, […]

It’s been a week of disparate but interesting advances. Here’s a summary of those I chose to tweet: Therapeutics There have been very good results in mice of a 2-drug therapy for radiation sickness. And in human ALS patients undergoing a phase II clinical trial of new drug dexpramipexole, the progression of the disease was […]

Digital Medicine With a processing speed of one trillion arithmetical floating point operations per second (1 teraflops) Intel’s latest computer chip is equivalent to a building-sized, 10,000-Pentium-chip supercomputer built a mere 14 years ago. Given such exponentially accelerating power, it should come as no surprise that the Beholder (as in ”Beauty is in the eye […]

Personalized Medicine and Cancer The discovery of multiple genes for colorectal cancer will lead to diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic targets for the disease. In about two years, we may expect to have available a test for post-surgical colon cancer recurrence that will identify which patients might benefit from chemotherapy. We can expect a tsunami of […]

Genomic and Molecular Medicine After many attempts over the past two decades, genetically modified mosquitoes may finally have a chance of helping to eradicate the dengue fever with which mosquitoes annually infect 100 million people and cause 500,000 cases of dengue hemorrhagic fever and 22,000 deaths, mostly among children. For the disease of choroideraemia (rarer […]